When she was a newborn he was enamored. "Hold Allie, hold Allie" he'd repeat over and over as he waddled through the house behind me. And then one day he stopped asking. It was an eerie silence that I now know would last for years to come. He lost complete interest in her, no longer making his morning trips to the side of her crib or trying to wrap her little fingers around his chubby toddler forefinger. He grew so unaware of her in fact that at times I was afraid that he'd step on her if I left her lying on the floor on her blankie. It was this change of events that would lead us down the path to our difficult discovery of autism.
She was not yet 6 months old when he received the diagnosis. The next three years of her life were to be spent traveling in the car and sitting for hours in waiting rooms as we shuttled her older brother to and from every kind of therapy imaginable. At night I would cry by the side of her crib with the deep sorrow of a mother missing the infancy of her last child.
It was during those early years that my anxieties mounted over the day she would bypass her brother. What a sad time it would be, I thought, when she could talk and he could not. But when the day came it was more glorious than a sun filled beach in paradise. When she learned her alphabet, learned to write, to read, to do arithmetic, to ride a bike . . . each milestone was as wonderfully exhilarating as the last.
Sometimes I start to worry about what the future holds- driving, dating, college, career, marriage, children - but then I remind myself that it's just the continuation of a marvelous journey, one that we will continue to celebrate with each one of our beautiful children. Milestones don't need to be same for everyone.
2 comments:
beautiful. And oh so true.
it is all so very true. children do things on different levels... besides, who would run down the dark stairs to the basement with kaiya and uh... brayden if we didn't have Kenna and Allie:)
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